Up Beat

Before Allen Ginsberg became the famous Beat Generation icon who founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, he was a young poet and student at Columbia University. In Kill Your Darlings, which opens today in Boulder, Daniel Radcliffe stars as a young Ginsberg interacting with other future greats such as William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston).

“It’s an interesting portrayal of Allen Ginsberg and his first year at Columbia in the late ’40s and seeing his influences and seeing these young writers who are very hungry for a new form of expression,” says the Dairy Center for the Arts’s Glenn Webb. “In typical Hollywood fashion, in order to create a heightened level of interest, they frame it around a murder that was committed, but the movie never fails to lose sight of what’s important — their pursuit of artistic expression.”